Medical Spanish for General Medicine

After spending six months working in Guatemala and another six months here at the Clinica Misional in Guadalupe, I decided to write this guide to help you learn some very basic “Medical Spanish.” It would indeed be wonderful if every volunteer were fluent in Spanish before she/he comes here to Ecuador. But that certainly cannot ever be possible. I knew before going to Guatemala that I would be spending a year or more as a volunteer physician in Central and/or South America. Because of that, I did a 6-week immersion language program in Guatemala before starting my volunteer work.

After working in the ER and the out-patient clinic at the Hospitalito Atitlan in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, I soon learned that I could do a very adequate job caring for Spanish-speaking patients. My 25 years of experience as a family practice and ER physician certainly helped. But I learned that I could see, talk to, listen to, examine, diagnose and treat patients without having more than a very basic knowledge of Spanish.

Before I left Indiana in the U.S. to go to Central America, I purchased three books that did help me considerably. I bought a good general English-Spanish dictionary, a pocket guide to medical Spanish, and an excellent English-Spanish medical dictionary (Spanish-English and English-Spanish Medical Dictionary by Onyria McElroy and Lola Grabb.) Using those resources I then wrote my own guide (“cheat-sheets”) to have on my desk. This guide covered the following:

body parts

General commands or instructions to the patient

How to take a medical history

How to do a more thorough review of systems

How to tell the patient her/his diagnosis

How to prescribe medication or other treatment so that the patient would
understand and remember

I have updated this guide to make it more usable. On the web site I am certain you have seen and read Dr. Beena Kamath´s general information guide to the Clinica Misional. I want to share my guide to medical Spanish as well as some other very simple and basic Spanish language information with you. I will try to put it in a form you can download and print if you choose to.

I will begin by helping you with some very basic and simple information about the Spanish language. Remember that I certainly am no expert in this language…although I am a pretty fair family and ER doc!